A Runner’s Letter to Her Younger Self

You don’t know it yet, but after this lap with your dad around the neighboring town’s high school track, you’ll be hooked. Running will be your escape from any worries that could possibly fill a 7-year-old’s mind.

You’ll be the oddly intense girl through elementary school, who takes 5K races weirdly seriously and trains for them by running through town holding a Walkman at just the right angle, so the Avril Lavigne CD doesn’t skip. When, the year before you start middle school, your mom brings up the idea of running “cross country,” you won’t be able to imagine how you’d have enough time to run across the country. Shortly after you start sixth grade, however, it will be a staple in your vocabulary.

You’ll experience a high you never thought possible when, in your senior year of high school, after many gut-wrenching track sessions, you make it to the ranks of “national elite” on MileSplit, the holy grail of ranking sites. You’ll feel as if you are just starting to reach your potential as an athlete as you enter college.

An achilles injury will hamper your running that first year, you’ll have a less-than-mediocre freshman campaign and lose your confidence. You’ll be too beat-up from your engineering course load to put much emotional energy into running, and it’s probably best that way.

Sophomore year you’ll get news of a femoral stress fracture after almost a year’s hiatus from running. You’ll sit in your college’s athletic center locker room sobbing, hoping that none of your teammates walk in, as you build up the courage to tell your coach you’re quitting. But you never do.

You won’t race for a full year. When you approach the starting line your junior year you’ll have tears in your eyes, but this time happy tears, tears of gratefulness. You’ll train on and off throughout junior year with nagging injuries. By your junior year you’ll finish dead last in your conference meet, but you’ll consider this a win because you made it there. Yet you’ll never stop comparing your times to your pre-injury days. Things will seem to be on an upswing your senior year, although your Achilles will knock you down right when you start to ramp up the training.

You’ll graduate college with a fire in yourself and a laundry list of things left to accomplish. Mainly, you will want to prove your ability to yourself again. You’ll have surgery to fix the many years of damage, but after the better part of a year and countless hours of weight room work, you’ll learn it may have not been successful.

At age 22, having logged almost enough miles to get you around the world, never mind across the country, you’ll realize that your identity as a runner lies so much deeper that in the physical act of running itself. It lies in the work ethic, values, and life lessons that running has taught you. It lies in the friends you’ve made, in the pasta dinners, in your punctuality, in your heart. It lies in the laughing fits and inside jokes made in the back of the cross country bus.

Running will be your personal therapist, your drug of choice, your silence in a noisy room. Running will make you feel more alive that you’ve ever felt anywhere else. Running will give you many trips to the track and early morning Saturday 5Ks with your dad.

Running will teach you that your limits are much, much farther away than you think they are. Running will teach you how to fall down over and over and over, then stand back up with a desire to succeed.

Most importantly, running will teach you how to practice gratitude—for the fact that you’re even a fraction of a percent better than you were the day before, for friends and family that are supporting you, for the fact that you’re still able to be active and competitive, and most importantly, for all that you have gained from running.

Fifteen years from now, you’ll sit down at your computer, unsure of how running will fit into your future, and feel the need to write an ode to the sport that has given you so much.

Sincerely,

Caroline

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Caroline Wolfe recently graduated from college with a degree in mechanical engineering and plans on attending graduate school in the coming fall for biomedical engineering. Her goal is to create prosthetics for those who don’t have the mobility that we take for granted. She lives in northern New Jersey and hopes to eventually return to the sport she loves, though she is enjoying biking and swimming.

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